Monday, January 17, 2005

This is not to say that the Bushes do not keep score. In a December interview with Time magazine, the president's father made plain that he does -- and that his son's victories can help settle some of his own accounts. The elder Bush recalled a nasty remark that Ann Richards, later the governor of Texas, made about him at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta in 1988.

"Remember when Ann Richards said George Bush was born with a silver foot in his mouth?" he asked writer Hugh Sidey. "And then when George beat her in his first run for governor, I must say I felt a certain sense of joy that he finally had kind of taken her down, I could go around saying, 'We showed her what she could do with that silver foot, where she could stick that now.'"